Hello Meltingpot Readers,
Last week, babygirl, who is now six-and-a-half, was playing in my room and trying on my clothes and jewelry. She picked up one of my African print scarves and tied it around her head, looked in the mirror and exclaimed, “Oh, wow, I finally look Black!”
I stopped what I was doing.
“What do you mean you finally look Black? What did you think you looked like?” I asked, knowing but still hoping she wouldn’t say it.
“Well, Maya told me she thought I was white,” babygirl said about one of her classmates from school.
“But Maya has seen me, she knows I’m your mother right?” I said. “So how could you be white?”
Babygirl shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, that’s not really the point,” I said. “You do know Black people aren’t all the same color? There are Black people with really dark skin and really light skin.”
“I know,” my daughter said confidentally as she turned back to the mirror to admire her authentically Black self, smiling and twirling around to see, I guess, if she looked Black from all angles.
The conversation veered off to another topic and we haven’t mentioned it again, but babygirl has been wearing the hell out that scarf.
Dear readers, these are the types of conversations that happen in my house and many other houses with multiracial family members or even families of the same race but different colors. I should know because I just wrote a book called, Same Family, Different Colors: Confronting Colorism in America’s Diverse Families
1. “Mom, if I had been alive during slavery, I wouldn’t have been a slave because I look white, right?” : Said my middle son when he was about nine or ten. I almost choked on my chewing gum when he asked me that. Who wants to say, “Sorry baby, because of that one-drop rule and because your mama is Black, you would have been fair game (no pun intended) to be a slave.” But that’s what I said, albeit in a little more nuanced and nicer way. But he got the message, light skin wouldn’t save you from slavery and Blackness isn’t defined by skin tone in the US.of A.
2. “We can’t move to the suburbs. Even though the little kids could pass as white, I might get shot.”: Said the eldest when we were briefly contemplating a move to the suburbs for schools. And this wasn’t so long ago. This comment broke my heart because it made me realize that even though there is no favoritism in our Meltingpot household, my eldest, who is also my darkest child, recognizes that his lighter-skin siblings have an advantage in not being perceived as a threat in this world. Obviously, we didn’t move.
3. “If Papi’s white and my skin looks like his, why can’t I be white too?”: Said the middle boy when he was no more than five as he held out his arm to compare his skin tone to his father’s. At five years old, it was too much to explain the one-drop rule and I found myself unable to articulate anything truly coherent that would make sense to my innocent child. And that’s when I realized just how ridiculous our racial rules and regulations are. In the end, I told my son that Papi wasn’t “white” he was Spanish and so was he. I told him he was a perfect mix of Spanish and Black and he could happily claim both of those identities.
4. “Papi’s not white, he’s pink!”: Said babygirl when she was about four. Somehow she had already ascertained that white was the antithesis of Black and that we were a Black family. She needed to make sure that her father fit into the mix so she corrected her brothers when they said Papi was white. She shook her head and proclaimed her father pink, which clearly is closer to brown and in no way in opposition to Black. And el esposo is kind of pink, so we rolled with it. And everyone was happy.
Now that my boys are 16 and 13 they talk about color and race and identity with each other. They joke about their differing skin tones, sometimes in ways I don’t necessarily like, but I hold my tongue because I think it’s healthy that they’re not hiding their thoughts and feelings. At age six, and in a very diverse school, babygirl is just beginning to be confronted with the outside world’s hangups on race and color. You would think that after raising two boys and literally writing the book on skin color differences, I’d be ready for whatever she brings to the table, but I’m not that naive. Babygirl will have her own trials and tribulations around color and identity to work through and I will simply do my best to be help her get through it with her self-confidence and self-worth intact.
And in the meantime, I’m going to let her keep wearing my scarf.
What kind of things have your kids said about color, race and identity that caught you off guard or you had to stop and pause before you answered? It’s not easy. Feel free to share so we can all feel a little better and/or help each other out.
I’m totally listening.
Peace!
